Storage Purchases — and Cisco SANs — Looking Up

After a slow start in 2009, storage area networks (SANs) ended strong with demand from all sectors across the globe. According to a recent industry report by Dell’Oro, the storage networking market grew 21 percent Y/Y.

Storage demand is being fueled not only by general economic recovery, but also:

Broader and more complex deployments of server virtualization;

Archiving and backup requirements;

Disaster recovery and business continuance applications; and

Regulatory compliance.

Aligning with these trends, Cisco SAN business (MDS product family) overall had a very strong calendar quarter with growth of more than 100% Y/Y. As a data point, Cisco MDS gained 13% market share and tied for #1 marketshare for Director-class switches. The market share gain was supported by several factors, including:

Shift in customer buying trends as they acquired a DC 3.0 solution and end-to-end architecture to scale their SAN, LAN and data center interconnect (DCI); and

NX-OS as single OS across LAN and SAN resonated well with large customers, who are now citing this as a key attribute.

It should be clear to the market that Cisco *is* committed to Fibre Channel. As another proof point, we recently introduced MDS 9148, the highest 8Gb/s density 1RU fabric switch in the market. Cisco is also investing heavily in other areas of storage networking to provide scalable SANs to enhance cloud services, security and migration services and data center interconnect solutions. Cisco continues to enable customers to upgrade to the latest technology (e.g., FCoE) without the need for forklift upgrades.

Cisco MDS 9000 switches are deployed in mission-critical data centers at the world’s largest financial institutions, automobile companies, service providers, retailers, energy companies, and healthcare organizations. You can read more about these case studies here to see why Cisco MDS is in 90% of Cisco’s top Global 3.0 accounts, has over $2.5B in cumulative revenue — and is still growing.

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